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A review by christopherc
Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper
3.0
This is a decent, though not amazing, biography of the travel writer most renown for his reminiscences of a youthful 1934–1935 walking tour across Europe, written decades later by a much older and wiser man. Biographer Artemis Cooper knew Leigh Fermor already from the early 1970s, as she is the granddaughter of Lady Diana Cooper and daughter of John Julius Norwich, close acquaintances of his. This allowed her to spend a great deal of time with Leigh Fermor while he was alive, soaking up details and entering into his confidence, and also it gave her a deep familiarity with the upper-class British society in which Leigh Fermor moved in the decades after World War II. Cooper evidently began work on the biography already in the early millennium, when Leigh Fermor was still alive, which enabled her to interview some of his acquaintances that passed away before he did.
The chapters on Leigh Fermor’s famous walk from Holland to Constantinople, and the account of his war years largely summarize previously published work. In some instances Cooper points out fictional in the account of the great walk, where Leigh Fermor invented a character or an itinerary, but she never gets deep into investigation. The years 1936–1939, when Leigh Fermor was living with the Romanian princess Balasha Cantacuzene, are covered only cursorily, presumably because everyone involved was long dead and there was little documentary evidence. The 30 years or so after 1945 are then an extremely detailed list of Leigh Fermor’s travels all over the world, and his stays at wealthy friends’ estates and attendance at their parties. His difficulty meeting publishers’ deadlines and ultimate abandonment of the third volume of his walking-tour memoirs are described in depth.
Besides the lack of detail on the Balasha years – for me perhaps the most intriguing part of Leigh Fermor’s life – one thing that holds this back from being a great biography is Cooper’s failure to give modern context for the places Leigh Fermor traveled. For example, Cooper mentions that Leigh Fermor had visited “Pogrodets” and “Koritza” during the war years in Greece, but it would have been helpful for readers to note that these are the Albanian towns of Pogradec and Korçë, respectively. The same is true of Leigh Fermor’s tour of Yugoslavia where he toured Byzantine monasteries in “southern Serbia” – this is now the ethnic Albanian-controlled portion of Kosovo.
The chapters on Leigh Fermor’s famous walk from Holland to Constantinople, and the account of his war years largely summarize previously published work. In some instances Cooper points out fictional in the account of the great walk, where Leigh Fermor invented a character or an itinerary, but she never gets deep into investigation. The years 1936–1939, when Leigh Fermor was living with the Romanian princess Balasha Cantacuzene, are covered only cursorily, presumably because everyone involved was long dead and there was little documentary evidence. The 30 years or so after 1945 are then an extremely detailed list of Leigh Fermor’s travels all over the world, and his stays at wealthy friends’ estates and attendance at their parties. His difficulty meeting publishers’ deadlines and ultimate abandonment of the third volume of his walking-tour memoirs are described in depth.
Besides the lack of detail on the Balasha years – for me perhaps the most intriguing part of Leigh Fermor’s life – one thing that holds this back from being a great biography is Cooper’s failure to give modern context for the places Leigh Fermor traveled. For example, Cooper mentions that Leigh Fermor had visited “Pogrodets” and “Koritza” during the war years in Greece, but it would have been helpful for readers to note that these are the Albanian towns of Pogradec and Korçë, respectively. The same is true of Leigh Fermor’s tour of Yugoslavia where he toured Byzantine monasteries in “southern Serbia” – this is now the ethnic Albanian-controlled portion of Kosovo.